Posts by linger
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Ariana Huffington is now on Uber’s board
Exploiting workers for profit is her favourite business model, after all.
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Polity: Australian election: Dust and Diesel, in reply to Craig Young,
I oppose any reduction of the five percent threshold on the basis that it might let such extremist elements into our Parliament.
And so what if it does? It might let more progressive elements into our Parliament too. (Mana, for example.) It certainly will lead to a greater diversity of views being represented. Additionally, if there’s more chance of some tangible result from voting for minor parties that actually represent voters’ views, more voters will be engaged. Overall, I think lowering the threshold – to the same level as required to win one electorate, thus also removing the so-called coattailing discrepancy – is well worth any attendant risk of bringing in some people you happen to fundamentally disagree with.
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One contribution to this pattern is the effect of continuing urbanisation: electorate boundaries (however regularly they are redrawn) will always lag behind the actual population figures, in such a way that urban voters will be systematically underrepresented by seats, and rural voters systematically overrepresented. Rural areas tend to be conservative/right-leaning, whereas large urban centres tend to be left-leaning, leading to an unavoidable systematic bias towards the representation of rural (conservative) voters in parliament.
In this (as in so many other things), the Left simply has to be better than the Right in order to win...
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Speaker: A Disorderly Brexit, in reply to Dennis Frank,
There are certainly legitimate enough concerns about the direction of the EU, but the decision to leave doesn’t seem to address any of them.
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Speaker: Are we seeing the end of MSM,…, in reply to andin,
is it a niche we need to scratch?
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Polity: Post "post-truth" post, in reply to Marc C,
Recommended further listening:
the most recent few episodes of BBC Radio 4’s series The Human Zoo cover a range of cognitive biases and their impact on decision-making:
As a matter of fact (14/6/2016) – on the nature of “facts” and their surprisingly tenuous connection to our decision-making process;
Shortcuts to the Simple Life (21/6/2016) – on our tendency to answer simple questions as proxies for the harder ones we actually need to answer;
That Post-Referendum Feeling (28/6/2016) – on how we justify our decisions after the fact and become more convinced our position was right, regardless of the outcome;
Trust me, I’m an expert (5/7/2016) – on human inability to judge who is a credible expert (cf. Kruger-Dunning effect), leading us to value our own irrelevant experience and ignore the informed “elite”.
(The programme does not say this, but it’s of course made much easier if you also demonize, or merely “other”, that group.) -
Hard News: Drug Intelligence, in reply to Shulgin,
fucking roaches
[Insert obvious joke about inappropriate drug use here]
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Access: Fighting seclusion with…, in reply to Angela Hart,
Gotta love I/S's line that any profit-seeking "partner" to such negotiations, like the profiteering providers of private prisons, and like the finance industry as a whole, is
parasitical on the real economy [...]. Like the hippo arse-leech, it survives by inserting itself into the squishy parts of the real economy and sucking.
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Polity: Post "post-truth" post, in reply to ,
What's unhealthy about the MSM is precisely that they're not "hard arse" about critiquing the government, but rather, lick-arse.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to BenWilson,
How does (justifiably) refusing to service the airport fit in practice within the business model whereby drivers generally can't risk refusing jobs based on destination? Is there an input code for "Request cancelled, it was an airport job, hence no can do"?